Manual Pages  — OD

od – octal, decimal, hex, ASCII dump

SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION ENVIRONMENT EXIT STATUS EXAMPLES COMPATIBILITY SEE ALSO STANDARDS HISTORY

od [-aBbcDdeFfHhIiLlOosvXx] [-A base] [-j skip] [-N length] [-t type] [[ + ]offset[ amp;. ][ Bb]] [file ...]

The od utility is a filter which displays the specified files, or standard input if no files are specified, in a user specified format.

The options are as follows:

-A base
	Specify the input address base. The argument base may be one of d, o, x or n, which specify decimal, octal, hexadecimal addresses or no address, respectively.
-a
	Output named characters. Equivalent to -t a.
-B -, -o
	Output octal shorts. Equivalent to -t o2.
-b
	Output octal bytes. Equivalent to -t o1.
-c
	Output C-style escaped characters. Equivalent to -t c.
-D
	Output unsigned decimal ints. Equivalent to -t u4.
-d
	Output unsigned decimal shorts. Equivalent to -t u2.
-e -, -F
	Output double-precision floating point numbers. Equivalent to -t fD.
-f
	Output single-precision floating point numbers. Equivalent to -t fF.
-H -, -X
	Output hexadecimal ints. Equivalent to -t x4.
-h -, -x
	Output hexadecimal shorts. Equivalent to -t x2.
-I -, -L -, -l
	Output signed decimal longs. Equivalent to -t dL.
-i
	Output signed decimal ints. Equivalent to -t dI.
-j skip
	Skip skip bytes of the combined input before dumping. The number may be followed by one of b, k or m which specify the units of the number as blocks (512 bytes), kilobytes and megabytes, respectively.
-N length
	Dump at most length bytes of input.
-O
	Output octal ints. Equivalent to -t o4.
-s
	Output signed decimal shorts. Equivalent to -t d2.
-t type
	Specify the output format. The type argument is a string containing one or more of the following kinds of type specifiers:
a	Named characters (ASCII). Control characters are displayed using the following names: 000 NUL Ta 001 SOH Ta 002 STX Ta 003 ETX Ta 004 EOT 005 ENQ 006 ACK Ta 007 BEL Ta 008 BS Ta 009 HT Ta 00A NL 00B VT 00C FF Ta 00D CR Ta 00E SO Ta 00F SI Ta 010 DLE 011 DC1 012 DC2 Ta 013 DC3 Ta 014 DC4 Ta 015 NAK Ta 016 SYN 017 ETB 018 CAN Ta 019 EM Ta 01A SUB Ta 01B ESC Ta 01C FS 01D GS 01E RS Ta 01F US Ta 020 SP Ta 07F DEL Ta amp; amp;
c	Characters in the default character set. Non-printing characters are represented as 3-digit octal character codes, except the following characters, which are represented as C escapes:

NUL	\0
alert	\a
backspace	\b
newline	\n
carriage-return
	\r
tab	\t
vertical tab	\v

Multi-byte characters are displayed in the area corresponding to the first byte of the character. The remaining bytes are shown as ‘**’.

[d|o|u|x][C|S|I|L| n]Signed decimal ( d), octal ( o), unsigned decimal ( u) or hexadecimal ( x). Followed by an optional size specifier, which may be either C (char), S (short), I (int), L (long), or a byte count as a decimal integer.

f[F|D|L| n]Floating-point number. Followed by an optional size specifier, which may be either F (float), D (double) or L (long double).

-v	Write all input data, instead of replacing lines of duplicate values with a ‘*’.

Multiple options that specify output format may be used; the output will contain one line for each format.

If no output format is specified, -t oS is assumed.

The utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

Dump stdin and show the output using named characters and C-style escaped characters:

$ echo "FreeBSD: The power to serve" | od -a -c
0000000    F   r   e   e   B   S   D   :  sp   T   h   e  sp   p   o   w
           F   r   e   e   B   S   D   :       T   h   e       p   o   w
0000020    e   r  sp   t   o  sp   s   e   r   v   e  nl
           e   r       t   o       s   e   r   v   e  \n
0000034

Dump stdin skipping the first 13 bytes using named characters and dumping no more than 5 bytes:

$ echo "FreeBSD: The power to serve" | od -An -a -j 13 -N 5
           p   o   w   e   r

The od utility conforms to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 ("POSIX.1").

An od command appeared in AT&T v1 .